https://kpmg.com/ph/en/home/in...
"The short answer is that the Tax Code enforces a Stock Transaction Tax (STT) on every sale, barter or exchange of shares in a listed company. Under Section 127(A) of the Tax Code, as amended by the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) Law, the STT rate is 6/10 of 1% based on the gross selling price or gross value in money of the shares of stock sold, bartered, exchanged or otherwise disposed.
      The burden to pay the STT, as provided in Revenue Regulations (RR) No. 6-08, is imposed on the seller or transferor and remitted by the seller or transferor's broker. The stockbroker who effected the sale has the duty to collect the tax from the seller upon issuance of the confirmation of sale, issue the corresponding receipt thereof, and remit the same to the tax authorities. "

Would such a STT tax in the USA reduce a lot of possibly harmful churn from algorithmic trading? Or would it be extremely harmful to everyone by reducing liquidity? Wondering how that is working out in the Philippines?

You're right about YouTube. I was thinking HEVC was one of their delivery formats, but apparently not.

Netflix definitely did use HEVC for delivery of some of its high-end content at one time. Whether they still do or not, I have no idea.

Either way, the fact that people are running into error messages suggests that there is some actual customer impact.

Except that nobody who buys one of their machines is going to think, "I could pay an extra $100 and my machine would work better." They're going to think, "This piece of s**t can't even do things that my cell phone from eight years ago can do. Why did I buy this, and why should I ever buy anything from this manufacturer in the future?"

This level of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior is a sure way to permanently lose customers.

...or decoding...

You mean like... anyone who wants to watch Netflix or YouTube or any other streaming service's high-res content?

I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

When I see things like "facial age verification", I have major concerns, whether we're talking about a site like Roblox (whatever that is — I don't know, and don't really care), social media, porn, or any other site. How are you going to do it without violating the privacy of every person who creates an account? And how are you going to verify that the person using the account is the person who created it without causing an even bigger privacy violation?

We do need some sort of age verification system, but we need it to be designed in a way that protects privacy. I have less than zero faith in any individual website to come up with such a system, and approximately zero faith in any individual government to do so. There really needs to be an international age verification working group that spends the next five years coming up with a system, then pressures everyone to implement it.

Doing it the other way around, with companies or governments shoveling bad, partial, or even dangerous solutions to the problem down everyone's throats, can only result in greater levels of push-back by the general public towards a proper scheme if someone ever creates it.

They did review and change the policy. Just too late to do any good. The point is that evidence-based medicine has to be treated as a starting point for diagnosis and treatment decisions, not a rigid decision tree.

Of course, none of that makes the CDC's new claims that "vaccines don't cause autism" isn't an evidence-based statement any less absurd. You can't ever realistically prove definitively that X cannot cause Y, because that would require knowing that there exists no combination of recognizable human genetics in which X would cause Y. Evidence-based medicine would mean assuming that X cannot cause Y until evidence exists to prove that it does or can, which has not happened.

What they're doing is rejecting evidence-based medicine based on a belief that the anecdotal information they have should be taken more seriously than the broad evidence to the contrary. This would be fine if that anecdotal information were based on actual brain scans prior to vaccination that showed that the vaccine triggered a change, but it isn't. Rather, involves mistaking correlation for causation, and a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, with a complete lack of any actual plausible explanation for how vaccines could cause autism beyond some vague hand-wavey pseudoscience.

And on top of that, we have a bunch of people who lack enough understanding of the scientific method and/or lack enough understanding of the subject to recognize when it is not being followed properly, and they are getting misled by charlatans with a political or personal agenda, presented in the form of pseudoscientific bulls**t papers that don't hold up to even modest scrutiny by someone with limited understanding of the subject or the scientific method, much less actual scientists in the field.

We also have a bunch of journals that publish papers outside their area of expertise, relying on outside experts that are in league with the papers' authors, and all sorts of other fun scientific fraud, which further contributes to this problem.

I'm not sure how to solve this problem, because it seems like a large percentage of the public simply lacks basic critical thinking skills and the ability to read over a paper and think, "Yes, but did you consider the following twelve common factors that could influence both the proposed cause and effect?" and realize that the paper is garbage. But a good starting point would be to pressure the news media across the political spectrum to hire actual science writers who UNDERSTAND SCIENCE to cover science-based stories.

Another good starting point would be to get more science-based shows on PBS that can talk about these issues and explain them to people and debunk bulls**t every week.

Unfortunately, evidence-based medicine has become a code word for "treat everyone with the same illness identically even when the data doesn't support doing so. That's how I ended up fighting a c. diff. infection. I was hospitalized for a related condition, and the first day of antibiotics put me at no fever, but after a day, I got a fever again, and I asked if the antibiotic had changed, and they said no, but maybe the ER gave me something different. They checked, and determined that yes, I had been on a different antibiotic in the ER, but said that they should keep the current antibiotics, and used "evidence-based medicine" as the reason. I had my doubts.

They were wrong. And six months later, the general standards for treating the condition I came in with changed, and they now treat it with the antibiotic that the ER gave me instead of one of the two that the hospital put me on afterwards, precisely because the standard treatment had a tendency to make c. diff. take over.

Whoops.

So I'm all for evidence-based medicine as a starting point, but when you realize it isn't behaving normally, you should adjust accordingly. Otherwise, patients suffer enormously.

But in theory, I do agree with you that evidence-based medicine is better than evidence-free medicine based on gut feelings and assumptions that correlation means causation and other fallacious reasoning.

When Google sells a 24-inch tablet, I'll care about Google being able to sell me a replacement that can do this. In the meantime, I want this feature on older, non-Google Android devices. :-)

Actually, I was remembering wrong there. Although TB can spread in other ways, it is primarily an airborne pathogen. So the biggest way to reduce the spread would be to add central heat and air with fresh air mixing and reduce the number of people sharing air for long periods of time. The second best way is contact tracing and prophylactic treatment.

But to add further to the comment about vaccine effectiveness, bacterial vaccines can be at least somewhat effective at preventing disease, e.g. the bacterial meningitis vaccine has something like 65% to 85% effectiveness, depending on age group and other factors, which is way better than nothing.

The TB vaccine only reduces infection risk by 20%. And when you're exposed frequently, that's barely even useful. The reason for this is that it hides from the immune system, which, as a result, takes a long time to start reacting to the bacteria, allowing it time to multiply for a while before you get a reaction. In mouse models, the reaction takes a whopping two weeks.

TB actually infects macrophages (primitive immune cells), and manages to literally hide inside them by adapting its exterior to maintain a neutral pH and by synthesizing enzymes that prevent the macrophages from maturing and that slow down apoptosis, which otherwise would release the bacteria, which would trigger T-cell activation. It's unclear whether there is a realistic way to prevent this delay.

It also plays tricks like triggering certain antigen-specific CD4+ T cells to the point of functional exhaustion while reducing antigens that would trigger other CD4+ cells so that they don't get detected. It somehow brings mesenchymal stem cells (blood vessel/lymphatic/connective tissue precursors) to the infection site, which further inhibit stem cells.

Presumably any better vaccine would have to either convince CD8+ T cells to react even without macrophages recognizing that something is wrong (perhaps by increasing the number of antigens that are included so that they are more likely to recognizing an antigen on the bacterium itself directly, early in the infection process, assuming this is even possible), convince CD4+ T cells to trigger macrophages in spite of signals to not do so, or overcome one of the design limits of the immune system (preventing T-cell exhaustion, increasing random macrophage apoptosis without an infection, etc.), some of which would likely require changing the person's DNA.

So fast diagnosis (universal health care and widespread rapid TB testing), contact tracing, etc. are critical to bringing it under control, and other prevention, such as not having large numbers of people in constant contact in areas with limited air circulation can also help. Meanwhile, vaccines, although not entirely infeasible, are likely to be more of a long shot.

Horseshit.

To learn maths properly - enough to do middle school math - you need to be taught it. You don't have to love it. You don't have to enjoy it, even. You just have to be taught.

Sure - it helps if you love it. But we're not talking calculus, here; we're talking algebra. Geometry. Not even trig. You don't need to love math to learn that.

"It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds

(Ironically applies well to Joss Whedon himself. Kind of wonder if one of the show writers was thinking about Joss when they wrote that...)

The only single-source point of failure is me.

I would honestly like to know if anyone here has switched from typical consumer food to home cooked non UPF, and can tell us how their body changed or felt? Personally I think I eat a combination of pretty high quality food with some things that must be UPF even McDonalds once in a blue moon fast food but not much cooking at home. Is there a significant change like weight reduction, improved mood/sleep/energy levels, etc. with home cooking and no UPFs?

...over 143 years, 46 of which were before the discovery of the first antibiotic.

over six years, all but about one of which were post-vaccine. These two diseases are not really comparable in any meaningful way.

About 1.23 million people die from TB in a typical year, which is not that far off from the worldwide COVID death toll each year. We're mostly not talking about COVID anymore, either.

Vaccines for bacteria are... problematic at best, because they have relatively low effectiveness at preventing infection. The best way to eliminate TB is to get clean water everywhere. Stopping TB through vaccination is like stopping pedestrian deaths with inflatable pedestrian balls. Yeah, it might reduce the mortality, but the real problem is unsafe pedestrian crossings / unsafe drinking water.